Saturday, August 2, 2008

In an email last night, Dark Wraith, an economics professor and HTML coder of no small talent, gave me the low down on the problem Blogger has been having with certain sites. I reprint it here verbatum.

Someone has brought back from the dead an old problem that Internet Explorer used to have with certain javascripts. The culprit right now is Site Meter. Many Websites are not loading tonight in Internet Explorer. This has come out of nowhere, but the problem is easy enough to fix if your site is not loading in IE.

In the old days, certain javascripts that were set at certain places in a Website would trigger a false error in Internet Explorer; now, all of a sudden, that little bug has come back from the dead. The easiest way to solve the problem, if you’re having it, is to get Site Meter off your site; the problem should vanish.

This, by the way, may not Microsoft’s doing. The conspiracy theory version of what’s going on is that it would really, really be to the snoops’ advantage if everyone were using Mozilla-based browsers: way too many “Get Firefox” fans do not know the connection between W3C and Total Information Awareness in that those rigid, school-marm standards of W3C Strict 1.0 are exactly what mass data aggregators need to put everything into databases.

That’s the conspiracy theory overview.

The benign explanation for what happened is that Microsoft’s recent updates have triggered the return of this old, IE bug. A variation on this benign explanation is that the code jocks at Site Meter tried to get fancy and rewrite the calling script, but made a boo-boo that brought the old IE bug back from the dead.

Take your choice of explanations.

The Dark Wraith will keep to himself which one he thinks is pretty much on target.

Once again in a world of spaghetti code and competing platforms, old problems, long thought solved resurface.

Just like the Taliban.

I heartily recommend his site for intelligent discussion, video lectures on basic economics, HTML For Bloggers, and some of the finest political ranting, amusing graphics. . .well, just go take a look for yourself.